June 12, 2015

Senate Preview of the Next Day’s Floor Schedule and Activity Wrap-up

While leadership for Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives send email floor alerts for the upcoming day’s legislative activities (and House Dems have a neat new mobile app), the Senate does not. Senate Democrats and Republicans publish on the web a daily summary of the prior day’s activities and what they expect will be on the schedule for the upcoming day. If you’re like me, this is useful information to have pushed to your inbox. Now you can.

Using the free web service IFTTT.com, which allows anyone to build simple connections between online products and apps, it is possible to take the RSS news feeds published by Democrats and Republicans and have it sent to you whenever it is updated. These connections are called recipes. I’ve build recipes for both parties and published them online.

The Democrats publish more information in their RSS feed, which is more useful for our purposes because it includes details. Here are the recipes you can add to your own account:

The Republicans do not publish much information in their feed, but they do let you know when their website has been updated (which contains more info).

  • The bare-bones Republican floor wrap can subscribed to here.
  • I have not been able to figure out how to pull the Republican preview of the next days’ activities from their feed without getting everything else. If you figure it out, let me know.
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June 12, 2015

Meet “Whip Watch”

Yesterday congressional Democrats released “Whip Watch,” an app that provides the public (and congressional staffers) a real-time mobile view into the Democrats’ whip operation. Most notably, it includes a live floor feed showing upcoming votes, with links to bills and amendments, and an extensive list of job announcements for House Democratic offices. Also included are the daily and weekly whip notices and a session calendar. While much of this information has been available previously, it has not been published in a mobile format.Continue Reading

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June 11, 2015

Legislink Goes Back in Time (and Bicameral)

The free roll call vote comparison tool Legislink has gone bicameral and back in time. It now is possible to compare roll call votes in the House and Senate going back to 1990. Previously, the site only worked for the House and only went back to 2003.

Developer Joe Carmel extended the vote data by drawing on prior work by GovTrack’s Josh Tauberer. At the click of a mouse, researchers and advocates can easily compare votes, a process that usually takes about an hour when done by hand. This is a tremendous boon for policy advocates who must mine the data for likely allies and adversaries. More on how Legislink works here.

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June 10, 2015

Legisletters: A Hub for Congressional Correspondence

This week GovLab beta launched a new tool, Legisletters, which automatically gathers congressional correspondence with agencies and publishes it in a searchable, user-friendly interface. The project is the brainchild of Travis Moore and Andrew Miller, with some advice from me, and was magnificently developed by John Krauss at GovLab.Continue Reading

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June 3, 2015

Events announcement: Learn Akoma Ntoso

Here is information about three upcoming events concerning Akoma Ntoso and Legal XML for Semantic Web techniques.
Continue Reading

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May 28, 2015

Congress and HTTPS

Earlier this week our friends at the Sunlight Foundation released a report that concluded “only 15 percent of congressional websites are HTTPS ready.” The use of HTTPS reduces the risk of interception or modification of user interactions with government online services. Coincidentally, building a congressional HTTPS dashboard is on our congressional tools wish list, and I was able to help Sunlight prior to the report’s release by hand-crafting a complete list of House and Senate committee and leadership websites, along with assorted legislative support agencies and offices and a few other useful legislative branch websites.

In looking over their findings and my background research, a couple of things stood out.Continue Reading

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May 21, 2015

Learning from #Hack4Congress

The Tuesday, May 12 #Hack4Congress awards ceremony at the House of Representatives’ majestic Judiciary Committee hearing room was the culmination of a 6 month long effort to engage technologically savvy members of the public with making Congress more open and efficient. The three winners of congressional data hackathons in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. presented their projects to three members of Congress, a bipartisan array of senior congressional staff, and a packed gallery filled with journalists, advocates, staff, academics, and others.Continue Reading

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May 19, 2015

Emerging Standards of Parliamentary Accountability Panel Discussion

by Júlia Keserű

The 3rd International Open Government Data Conference in Ottawa is part of a full week of open data events. Alongside the pre-conference events, the National Democratic Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Latin American Network on Legislative Transparency, as core partners in OpeningParliament.org, a community of civic organizations dedicated to opening up parliamentary data, will co-host a three-hour pre-conference event on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 27, from 2:00 to 5:00pm. The meeting will be held in the Shaw Conference Centre in Ottawa, Room 201.

The goal of the pre-conference discussion is to discuss emerging standards for parliamentary accountability, as well as the data needed to monitor compliance with them. The panelists will showcase some of the relevant work around standards and norms on openness, including the introduction of discussion documents on standards on three specific topics:

1) Parliamentary Conduct and Ethics (presented by Scott Hubli and Greg Brown, National Democratic Institute)

2) Money, Politics and Transparency (presented by Lindsay Ferris, Sunlight Foundation)

3) Lobbying (presented by Daniel Freund, Transparency International EU)

The discussion will be co-moderated by Senator Hernán Larraín, chair of the Bicameral Commission on Transparency of the Congress of Chile, and Alisha Todd, director general of ParlAmericas.

A panel discussion and introduction of these new global standards will be followed by breakout sessions on each of the three topics. If you have any questions, please email Dan Swislow (dswislow@ndi.org) or Julia Keseru (jkeseru@sunlightfoundation.com).

Please RSVP for the open parliament pre-conference event using this link.

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May 13, 2015

New tool: Roll Call Vote Comparisons

The indefatigable Joe Carmel, creator of LegisLink, just unveiled a new tool for comparison of House Roll Call Votes. Drawing on a combination of official source material and prior work by Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack fame), the Roll Call Comparison Tool allows the easy comparison of two roll call votes, even if they don’t take place in the same session of Congress.

Why is this important? Often times, congressional staff and advocates compare multiple votes to identify strong supporters or opponents of legislation, or figure out where a new vote is likely to come out. This work is often done by hand and can take an hour to complete per comparison. This new tool makes it instantaneous. His work was prompted by the Congressional Data Coalition’s new list of congressional civic technology tools that should be built.Continue Reading

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May 12, 2015

Audio of CDC at SXSW on “Your Laws, Your Data”

In March, several members of the Congressional Data Coalition spoke at SXSW in a panel entitled “Your Laws, Your Data.” (Daniel Schuman, Congressional Data Coalition co-chair; Molly Schwartz, associate fellow, R Street Institute; Molly Bohmer, data curator, Cato Institute; and Rebecca Williams, policy analyst, data.gov.)

Audio from that conversation is now available.

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